How to maximise on your partnership with a software service provider

I have decided to publish many of the internal notes I write. I realised that when I share my observations and learnings with the internal PYGIO team, they are authentic, data-backed and experience-backed - but most importantly they are what people really want to read. Real, raw and candid. I hope I don't get into trouble for these notes some day.

Here’s a note on why outsource software service providers exist and why these companies are valuable partners:

We have had around 50 projects implemented at PYGIO in the last 4 years. Most of the challenges that our clients come to us to solve, while sometimes subtle, are very important. Here are the three main buckets:

1. ROI, Product Velocity and Observability
2. R&D-as-a-Service
3. Accessing Talent

ROI, Product Velocity and Observability

When an enterprise business unit head approaches us, they are looking to increase their ability to take products to market in a way that does put their capital at risk.

Hiring PYGIO to execute on a piece of work means the client knows what they are spending upfront, knows what their outcome will be and knows that if sh*t hits the fan, that PYGIO’s entire team will go through major steps to support their project ambitions and success, as if we were a partner or owner in their business.

Let’s face it, if we do shoddy work, we’re out!

We give our clients’ management a clear investment case for spending their money: what work will be done, how will it be done, when will it be done, what will the investment amount be, what will the team be and what is the ROI - either in a cost reductive effort or a revenue accretive effort. That’s intellectually honest development and investment frugality. Sometimes we go through Discovery with clients, and they realise - heck - this project is not worth the spend!

R&D-as-a-Service

We invest all of our free cashflow back into our people and into experimenting with new tech. We spend millions of $s and thousands of hours of our people’s time, upskilling our team, build prototypes and conduct deep research into an unproven but high-potential tech.

Often, these R&D efforts go nowhere.

But that means our clients don’t have to pay for expensive experimentation - we’ve done it for them. We know what works, and we know what doesn’t.

When a new technology comes out, best believe we know about it, if it is in our field of competence. Our clients have access to this know-how and can leverage the effort, blood, sweat, tears and scars to their advantage.

Accessing Talent

Ronnie Apteker once told me that it is not the learned who are rewarded for their specialised knowledge. It is those who have unique knowledge that are rewarded and valued. If you can Google or ChatGPT the answer, it’s not that valuable. H taught us that one.

At PYGIO, we have spent huge amounts of time and money, travelling and zoom calling to find the best talent in the world. This lattice of experiences allows us to sell perspective and strategy to hungry clients that compete in their home towns for talent.

We know which towns to hire NASA-grade engineers at affordable rates.

We know which towns not to waste our time with hiring, where the cultural differences are too steep, and when they are value-adding.

Our clients can leverage our years of pain and success in finding these hotspots to their competitive advantage.

Now, we’re working on improving how we tackle these 3 buckets of value for our clients and how we bring our solutions seamlessly to market.